The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A typical computer network consists of various devices such as routers, switches, wireless access points, firewalls, etc. FIG. 1 illustrates an example network that includes such elements.
A typical network device provides a command interface that is accessible using the telnet protocol, a secure shell (SSH) connection, or serial port interface to create, update, retrieve and store management information relating to the device. A network management station (NMS) can deliver commands through such an interface to provide a higher level or enhanced management capability to the network operator or administrator. Each device in the network can be managed individually by one or more than one network management stations.
The management aspects of a device are defined as mechanisms available on the device to add, delete, modify and monitor the behavior of a device as required by the network operator to achieve the required operation on the device. The management aspects of each device are obtained by means of Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), Telnet, Secure Shell (SSH) and other access methods provided by the individual devices.
However, management of large networks is cumbersome, error-prone and time-consuming using current approaches. For example, assume that a large network comprises dozens of network devices of the same type, all of which require the same configuration change. In this context, applying the same change to each device individually is time-consuming and error-prone.
Further, for management purposes, applying a particular configuration command or query to all devices that share a particular characteristic may be useful. Prior systems have offered the ability to display the features or characteristics of a particular device or groups of devices. However, in the past there has been no good way to apply the same command to all devices in a group or view.
Therefore, there is a need for a better way to manage a network to overcome the foregoing problems.